First Peoples: Guest Blogger: Daniel Heath Justice on Avatar
original source firstpeoplesnewdirections.org:
Amidst all the hype and excitement surrounding James Cameron’s new film, Avatar, many have critiqued its use of Indigenous imagery and innuendo and have charged that it is a thinly veiled colonialist fantasy that perpetuates damaging stereotypes. First Peoples New Directions asked First Peoples advisory board member, Daniel Heath Justice, to weigh in with his own thoughts on the film and its allusions to indigeneity, colonialism, and other pertinent issues.
Justice is a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He is associate professor of Aboriginal literatures and Aboriginal Studies at the University of Toronto, and has written extensively on Indigenous North American literary expression. He also teaches a regular course in fantasy and horror literature and is the author of The Way of Thorn and Thunder, an Indigenous fantasy trilogy.
James Cameron’s Avatar: Missed Opportunities
By Daniel Heath JusticeApologies for spoilers! And thanks to Kent Dunn, Jim Cox, and Kirby Brown for their comments on early drafts of this blog.
In the past few weeks, I’ve chatted with a number of friends, colleagues, and students about the phenomenon that is Avatar. Certainly this particular community tends to be quite conversant about prominent themes in the film, such as Indigenous sovereignty and spirituality, colonization and decolonization, other-than-human kinship, traditional ecological knowledge and environmental destruction, so although we’re a diverse group we do have some values that align pretty closely across our differences. And given the fact that the film has already met with some pretty blistering critique online and in print from both the right and the left for its handling of many of these themes, I’d initially thought that the underlying perspective emerging from these conversations would be sweeping dismissal, or at least substantial indignation.
That’s not how it turned out, not even for me. Our responses ranged from guarded optimism (given that a huge international audience is clearly so engaged with a film that confronts the horrors of colonialism and resource exploitation) to thoughtful frustration (it’s powerful in so many ways, but why do we need yet another story about Indigenous struggle told through a non-Native’s voice and perspective?), but no one dismissed it. On the whole, the overwhelming sense was, “Well, it’s flawed, but at least it’s getting people talking.” That there’s so much commentary in the blogosphere on the film’s underlying current of “white guilt” indicates to me that something is happening with audiences and critics; it’s probably too early to tell yet what that is, but there’s probably a good opportunity here to engage an audience on Indigenous issues that might not otherwise have been interested or receptive.
To be honest, I went in expecting to hate the film....
Tags: colonialism, critique, environment, film, sovereignty, stereotypes
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Guest Blogger, Popular Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
thank you, Zan! I think Daniel Heath Justice's critique from a First Nations perspective validates my first response. And after this post though, on to other works!